Sharing your theme

Submit your theme to the Recalbox theme manager, straight from the studio.

Recalbox has a theme manager: themes install from there, with nothing to copy by hand. To get a theme in, you submit it — and everything happens from this studio.

📘 No repository to fork, no merge request, no file to write: the studio builds the package, takes the screenshots and submits everything for you.

Submitting your theme

Two doors, one destination:

Your theme is in the studio — the “Export or publish” button, “Publish” tab;
Your theme is a folder or a zip — “Import an existing theme”, then “submit it for publication”.

Either way, you describe your theme in a few fields and send it. That's all.

⚠️ You need the right to do it. Submitting a theme is open to the roles the team has picked on the Recalbox Discord: if the button isn't there, you don't have it yet.

What the studio does for you

it photographs your theme — every view, every resolution you announce, and one image per theme option — then keeps the best ones;
it writes the theme record (name, version, author, description, supported displays);
it uploads the files and lets everyone know.

⚠️ Your archive is sent as is. The studio only looks inside it to take the screenshots; it never rewrites it. Your folders, your file names, your layout: nothing moves.

What happens next

your theme goes to the vote — theme makers look at it screen by screen and give their opinion, with a note if they want to;
an administrator decides. The vote informs, it does not decide: no one is published by a tally;
accepted, the theme enters the theme manager and every Recalbox sees it. Refused, you get a reason — enough to fix it and submit again.

You follow all of it from “My themes”: your theme's card shows “request pending”, and the “Publish” tab shows the tally and what people wrote (without their names).

Updating a published theme

Same road: submit your theme again, with a higher version number.

⚠️ An update does not go through the vote — it's your theme, you know its state. It only waits for an administrator to put it online. Nobody has to reinstall anything: the theme manager offers them the update.

What gets you refused

an incomplete theme: an empty view, a display announced but never worked on;
images that aren't yours;
compatibility announced without trying it — claiming CRT when you have never looked at it on a tube shows immediately.